Ryan Smith, Ryan Sweeney partner to launch sports tech investment fund
Utah Jazz and Utah Hockey Club owner Ryan Smith and Accel partner Ryan Sweeney have joined forces again to found Halo Experience Co. (HXCO), an investment firm that will specialize in technology startups operating within the sports and entertainment industries.
Smith co-founded Utah County tech giant Qualtrics with his father in 2002 and, after selling a majority interest in the company in 2019 for a reported $8 billion, began to invest in the sports world. He bought the Jazz of the NBA from Larry H. Miller’s family in 2020 for $1.66 billion and the Arizona Coyotes of the National Hockey League last year for $1.2 billion. He relocated the hockey franchise to Salt Lake City, temporarily renaming it the Utah Hockey Club.
Smith recently relinquished his ownership stakes in Real Salt Lake of Major League Soccer and the Utah Royals of the National Women’s Soccer League.
Sweeney, who holds minority ownership in both the Jazz and the Utah Hockey Club, is invested in at least 25 companies as a partner at Accel, a San Francisco venture capital firm that invests in early and growth-stage companies. Accel holds equity positions in companies like Venmo, Braintree, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook and Spotify.
Smith and Sweeney aren’t the first private investors to take a shot at the growing sports tech sector. They’ll face competition from firms like Sapphire Sport and Bluestone Equity Partners but believe their combined investment experience will give them an advantage, Smith told Sports Business Journal.
HXCO has a goal of raising up to $1 billion to support about two dozen portfolio companies through each round of their growth trajectories, just as Sweeney’s Accel did for Smith’s Qualtrics.
Smith and Sweeney are the general partners of the new joint venture, which will operate independently of Accel, Qualtrics and Smith Entertainment Group but will receive some support from Accel, the partners said.
“Sports is not just leisure and entertainment anymore,” said Sweeney in an interview with Sports Business Journal. “It’s a vertical in the same sense that you would talk about health care, you would talk about education, you would talk about government. Sports has become one of those big markets with trillions of spend.”
Sweeney described sports as touching “every facet of the economy” — social media, security, health and wellness, digital media, payments and talent — while Smith described the money going into sports right now as “insane.” His ownership in sports has afforded him a perspective to see the influence of new tech trends more closely.
“I’m watching this tech revolution happen with AI right now, and I’ve been investing a ton out of my family office,” said Smith, who no longer runs Qualtrics day to day but remains its founder and executive chairman. “Sweeney and I got talking, and it was just like, ‘I want to be a part of this. I want to be a part of the next phase of tech.’”
The partners said the name “Halo Experience” was chosen to represent the idea of seeking technology around the live experience, but it also conjures the halo effect, by which companies try proving their products in the highly public sports sector before moving them downstream to consumers.
“Sports now own the majority of the experience economy,” Sweeney told the magazine. “Coming out of COVID, the rush to the experience economy, both from businesses and consumers, is honestly unlike anything I’ve seen in my investing career.”